Shared books: collaborative publication management for an office information system
COCS '88 Proceedings of the ACM SIGOIS and IEEECS TC-OA 1988 conference on Office information systems
On the influence of scale in a distributed system
ICSE '88 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Software engineering
Exploiting read-mostly workloads in the FileNet file system
SOSP '89 Proceedings of the twelfth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Cache management algorithms for flexible filesystems
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
RFS: a network file system for mobile devices and the cloud
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
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Andrew is a distributed computing environment being developed in a joint project by Carnegie Mellon University and IBM. One of the major components of Andrew is a distributed file system which constitutes underlying mechanism for sharing information. The goals of the Andrew file system are to support growth up to at least 7000 workstations (one for each student, faculty member, and staff at Carnegie Mellon) while providing users, application programs, and system administrators with the amenities of a shared file system.A fundamental result of our concern with scale is the design decision to transfer whole files between servers and workstations rather than some smaller unit such as records or blocks, as almost all other distributed file systems do. This paper examines the consequences of this and other design decisions and features that bear on the scalability of Andrew.Large scale affects a distributed system in two ways: it degrades performance and it complicates administration and day-to-day operation. This paper addresses both concerns and shows that the mechanisms we have incorporated cope with them successfully. We start the initial prototype of the system, what we learned from it, and how we changed the system to improve performance. We compare its performance with that of a block-oriented file system, Sun Microsystems' NFS, in order to evaluate the whole file transfer strategy. We then turn to operability, and finish with issues related peripherally to scale and with the ways the present design could be enchanced.